Why seawater?

Fusion, as Mary Bellis explains in her article on the Internet, "is the power source of the sun and the stars. The large quantity of energy released by them is the result of the conversion of matter into energy. This occurs when the lightest atom, hydrogen, is heated to very high temperatures forming a special gas called ‘plasma.’ In this plasma, hydrogen atoms combine, or ‘fuse,’ to form a heavier atom, helium. In the process of fusing, some of the hydrogen involved is converted directly into large amounts of energy.”

The table-top device of the scientists, consisting of a glass canister about the height of two coffee mugs stacked on top of one another, as describes Emil Venere in Purdue News, uses a liquid called deuter­ated acetone. That is, the acetone contains a form of hydrogen called deuterium, also known as heavy hydrogen, which contains one proton and one neutron in its nucleus unlike normal hydrogen which contains one neutron only. As Taleyarkhan explained to Cooper, one out of every 6,000 atoms of sea water is heavy hydro­gen.

The researchers simultaneously bombard the liquid in the canister with pulses of neutrons every five milliseconds (thou­sandths of a second) and a specific frequency of ultrasound. The first leads to the formation of tiny cavities in the liquid; the second causes the cavities to form into bubbles that are about 60 nanometers (one billionth of a meter) in diameter which rapidly expand to about 1,00,000 times their original size. The tremen­dous force with which these bubbles implode (contract) to their original size within nanoseconds leads to the release of flashes of light known as sonoluminescence. And "because the bubbbles grow to such a relatively large size before they implode, their contraction causes extreme temperatures and pressures comparable to those found in the interior of stars,” writes Venere.

At that point deuterium atoms fuse together, the same way hydrogen atoms fuse in stars, releasing neutrons and energy in the process. The process also releases a type of radiation called gamma rays and a radioactive material called tritium, all of which has been measured and recorded by the team, notes Venere. Taleyarkhan told the reporter that unlike the earlier experiment where the results had a roughly one in 100 chance of being at­tributed to phenomena other than fusion, the new, more precise results represent "one in a trillion chance of being wrong.”